Hot beverage makers and especially automatic drip coffee makers are well known and widely used. They are effective to brew carafes of coffee, typically containing five to eight cups or more of liquid. Automatic drip coffee makers may also be used for brewing small batches (one to four cups), and some coffee makers include known modifications and adjustments to hot water flow rates to improve the quality of the brewed beverage in small batches.
An alternative to using loose coffee grinds placed in a filter is to simply place prepackaged filter packs into a brew basket. Prepackaged filter packs contain a predetermined amount of coffee grinds adapted to brew approximately four to six cups per pack. More than one filter pack may be used at a time depending on the quantity of coffee being brewed or on the specific taste of the consumer.
A recent coffee maker platform that has been developed uses single serving filter pods in a pressurized, hot water system. While these filter pods work well to brew coffee in these pressurized systems, there are challenges in the use of filter pods with an automatic drip coffee maker platform. For instance, a filter pod may float in water inside a brew basket or become tilted in a brew basket. The result is weak and inconsistent coffee, because water is able to go by and not through the filter pod containing the coffee grinds. Conventional automatic drip coffee maker brew baskets are not engineered to effectively accommodate filter pods.
Another potential limitation with the use of a single filter pod in a hot beverage brewing platform is that there is an invariable amount of flavor and solids that may be extracted from the pod, thereby limiting either the volume of hot beverage produced or its strength. There is a need to be able to use two or more hot beverage filter pods to brew stronger or larger serving size brewed beverages. Unfortunately, there are problems in the use of two or more hot beverage pods in traditional hot beverage makers. Using multiple filter pods in traditional brew baskets allows the pods to float, have an inconsistent “dwell time” with the hot water, and/or become disoriented in the fluid flow, thereby affecting the brewing mechanics and causing the brewed beverage to have an unpredictable strength.